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Honey House Plans?

Hi All,
Hey looking at building a new honey extracting/bottling building and I want to include a separate store front area within the same building.
Plans and lot's of suggestions (do's and don'ts) would be greatly appreciated.
I was thinking about a barn style building so I have a loft (useable upstairs for storage or ?) as I don't have much yard area so was thinking that I have air space instead so take advantage of it!
Building size will roughly be around 24'x 45' with a 10' lean-to off back (depending on how much yard I can talk the wife out of).
I will try to post some pics of the building style I really like later on.
Thanks Much!
Mtn. Bee

Re: Honey House Plans?

Can't Justin as the only place I have to build is between house and property line! Small city lot in town but great location to sell honey, bee supplies/equipment, wooden ware, etc. also located along truck route so could get to location with a big rig if needed.
I might be able to squeeze the buildings walls out to 26' ??? I am going to talk to the builders about there thoughts before making the final decisions!

Re: Honey House Plans?

1. KEEP THE PUBLIC OUT OF THE WORK AREA!!! That part is the separate building.

2. You might like a drive-in garage door for unloading out of the sun / rain. It could save using a dolly.

3. Setup depends on size of your operation. How many hive are you running? How many people in your operation? I was just in this exact discussion with my main advisor (a 40-year beekeeper) this morning.

Sideliners tend to run 50 to 200 colonies. A 400 to 550 hive operation usually uses two 60 or 75-frame extractors, a pump, and a large settling tank set above a table tall enough for a food-grade barrell to go under. At about 1,000 hives, you look into as much fully-automatic equipment as you can. Commercial operators tend to run 700 to 1,000 hives per person, unless it is a family operation and several people put in part-time, unpaid labor. At some point, time is the most important factor, because your are big enough that you are already making money.

Dadant and Sons 2012 Catalog had a sketch of a small (up to 150 hives operation) setup. There are a lot of equipment options out there - Dadant, Maxant, Cowan, to name a few.

Write out a step-by-step process plan, and try to figure how much each step in the process would cost at different levels. Then figure which operations you could do quickly be hand and which are really a whole lot better off done by machine. From this, you can figure a budget. Many people get stuck by not planning the whole process, then end up with mismatched equipment that was purchased at different times as their operation grew.

Some considerations are: How much filtration - bulk honey, "natural" honey, super clear show quality + settling tanks?; How much heat - 105 degrees F, 115 degrees F, or 130 degrees F (pump capacity and tube diameters can really speed up with the right amount of heat)?; How will I be cleaning up the mess?; Will this operation grow (especially # of people)?

Watch the movie, More Than Honey. It shows an automated operation with frame scrapers, de-boxing, uncapping, loading, extracting, unloading, etc. Go to a few different operations and look at their setups, quietly thinking, "where are the bottlenecks to workflow here?" and "where does the person go?"